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Some ideas on negotiating online and print contracts

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2012 was the year our Westlaw contract came up for renewal, and in the process I looked at Bloomberg and Lexis.  While Bloomberg was an impressive product, I felt that the pricing was prohibitively expensive, however, Lexis came in with a very strong proposal.

If we were to afford both Lexis and Westlaw it meant adjusting the content to avoid excessive duplication and select that content from each where we thought one did a better job than the other.

Case law, statutes/regulations and some secondary sources were part of primary plans from both Lexis and Westlaw.  However, I could play with the content mix with dockets, public records, verdicts/settlements and the bulk of secondary sources.  It is my opinion  that Westlaw offers a slightly better docket product, but felt that Lexis’ public records were more comprehensive and flexible than Westlaw’s.  We also wanted the Matthew Bender and verdicts/settlements libraries from Lexis and West’s ALR, AmJur and CJS databases.  I also preferred Factiva/News over the comparable content on Westlaw.

Of course your choices might be different.  For example, you might wish to include Lexis’ ALM content and/or Courtlink – but the bottom-line is to avoid as much duplication as you can and while maximizing each contract for a vendor’s perceived strengths.

For more savings we included our LMA in the talks even though it was not up for renewal at the time.

If you plan on keeping enough of your print collection in an LMA you might find that West will be more flexible with the cost of that contract than in lowering the cost of Westlaw outright.  But you have take a hard look at your print collection and pare it down to what you expect to retain for 2-3 years.  This year was ideal for us to do this since we are configuring our library and retiring some print was a natural part of the process.  Also, in general moving from print to electronic is something we are doing with most of our loose-leafs subscriptions.

There were a couple of other things we got that saved us some money, but I do not wish to address them publicly.  Feel free to contact me privately and I will go into more detail.

By adjusting the content and being somewhat creative I think you can find ways to save on the cost of these large contracts.



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